The Invention of Lying - discussion guide

Image courtesy Universal Pictures © 2009

Summary

The premise is simple. Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) lives in a world without lies. Everyone tells the truth all of the time. There is no flattery, no deception and no religion. It means that life's ‘losers’, like the stub-nosed, podgy Mark, are left at the bottom of the pile, with no hope of improving their prospects. There's plenty of comic potential here, and Gervais (as director and lead actor) manages to exploit most of it. The only films in this world are historical documentaries (delivered from an armchair, narration only), and product advertisements are reduced to begging: ‘Coke. It's very famous’; ‘Pepsi. For when they don't have Coke.’ The dialogue between characters is filled with arrestingly blunt comments which are both outrageous and amusing to us as viewers, but are entirely natural (or so it seems) for a society without lies.

This all continues until a synaptic storm in Mark's brain dramatically changes the trajectory of him and his world. Strapped for cash and facing eviction, he walks into his bank to withdraw all his money, $300, and makes his new discovery: why not say he has $800? His ruse works (the cashier knows that everyone tells the truth, after all), and Mark has told the world's first lie. It's at this moment he realises he can live life the way he wants it. No longer is he condemned to remain a loser; by lying he can change his world, achieve success in his screenwriting work and, inevitably, win the girl, Anna (Jennifer Gardner), who has so far snubbed his every advance.

The Invention of Lying is in this sense a rather conventional offering from the romantic comedy genre, but it has a Gervais twist that has brought a mixed response from critics. Yet in this comedy setting, the film raises some surprising issues. For instance, does speaking the truth actually mean verbalising every thought? Can we justify ’good lies’, as long as they're not intended to hurt anyone? Such questions arise for us as Mark treads out the moral issues of lying for the first time.

Background

The Invention of Lying is the result of collaboration between Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, who wrote and directed the film together. Both were directing a feature-length work for the first time. Ricky Gervais's fame, now worldwide, began when the sitcom The Office first aired in 2001. The series, co-written with Stephen Merchant, has won two Golden Globes. Beginning with The Office, Gervais has built a reputation for a kind of comedy which tests the boundaries between humour and poor taste. The Invention of Lying is, in many ways, no different, but it has less of the edge that we've seen from Gervais before.

Gervais is open about his atheist viewpoint, and one of the areas of our world (with its lies) that the film critiques is organised religion. He is insistent, though, that the film is not atheist propaganda; rather, the lack of a supernatural represents a decision of the writing process. All the same, there is ample material to explore the theme, and we might wonder whether all religious claims in our world are necessarily inventions of the kind Mark stumbles on here.

Questions for discussion

1. Did you enjoy the film? What parts made a particular impression on you?

2. What were the main features of a world without lies? Did you find the world convincing?

3. How would you characterise the kind of truth shown in this world?

4. Were you shocked by some of the supposedly truthful exchanges between some of the characters in the film? How were these made to be funny as well as outrageous?

5. Ricky Gervais said in a recent interview that fairness and justice are important to him.[1]How does the plot of The Invention of Lying reflect this?

6. Why do you think Mark decided to use his ability to lie to tell his mother that death was not an eternal nothingness?

7. What elements of Mark's religion of the ‘Man in the Sky’ do you recognise from our world?

8. Imagine that you were a member of the crowd listening to Mark, but you knew he had the ability to lie. What questions would you ask about his claims? What evidence would you need to be convinced that he was telling the truth?

9. Why do the characters in the film appear to be convinced by Mark's revelations about the ‘Man in the Sky’, and what does it show about their desires? Do you find the same desires in yourself?

10. Gervais comments that he sees religion as being one of the good lies, that it ‘probably started as a few white lies to comfort even oneself’.[2]What value is there in a lie of such magnitude that it leads people ultimately to false hope? Is that a hope worth having? Why or why not?

11. To what extent did lying enable Mark to live life the way he wanted it? In your view, does lying make our daily interactions better, compared to the exchanges in the film? What problems with lying are highlighted?

12. Why does Mark find it so difficult to lie to Anna, even though it would have convinced her to marry him? Could we say Anna loved Mark if he had done so?

13. What kind of truth-telling does the film show, a) in blunt exchanges between characters, and b) as Mark encourages Anna to see beyond outward appearances?

14. In the eyewitness account of Jesus' life written by John, he records that Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6). In the culture of that time, to claim these things was to claim to be God himself. C.S. Lewis commented that the only conclusions one can make about someone who claims this is that they are either a liar, a lunatic, or God himself. How would you evaluate a claim of this kind?

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